Understanding Behavioral Dependencies in Class Hierarchies using Concept Analysis

The functionalities of software artifacts are defined by structural and behavioral dependencies. During evolution and maintenance phases of a system, the developer has to be able to understand how these dependencies were defined and how they influence the interaction of the artifacts. The developer must be sure that modifications done in the system will not break its behavior. In the most of the cases, this happens because the dependencies are not documented. We propose to tackle this problem in the context of object oriented classes hierarchies using Concept Analysis. We use different properties about invocations in methods to analyze the dependencies among the hierarchy classes in terms of class behaviour. Based on these results, we show a set of patterns that describe repeated kinds of behavior in class hierarchies. We show the application of these patterns in the specific case of Magnitude hierarchy in Smalltalk.